


Understanding something doesn't mean you can change it (except where you can)

by sirona



Category: Captain America (2011), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Minor Character Death, questionable parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-06
Updated: 2011-11-06
Packaged: 2017-10-25 18:39:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/273504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirona/pseuds/sirona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Howard Stark went from <i>Captain America</i>'s Howard Stark to the one Tony grew up with. And a possible explanation for Tony's Mom not taking more of an interest in her son. And Tony coping with the parents he's been saddled with. With bonus appearances from Peggy Carter, Dummy and, eventually, Steve himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Understanding something doesn't mean you can change it (except where you can)

**Author's Note:**

> Contains Howard/Steve (one-sided), Howard/Maria, hints of Steve/Peggy and Tony/Steve. And defies rational explanation for its existence. But it's something I've been thinking about for a while, and it wanted out.
> 
> Warning for parenting failure (The Starks), angst, and the fact that understanding why something happens doesn't mean that you can fix it. I like to think that it ends on a positive note, though.
> 
> Disclaimer: None of these characters belong to me, obviously. I should point out that all knowledge I have of the characters was gained from watching the films.

"Sir?"

"Take us to the next grid point."

"But there's no trace of wreckage-- A-and the energy signature stops here."

"Just keep looking."

\---

She finds him in the lab, again. How many nights in a row does that make? It's half past three in the morning, but he's elbows-deep in some kind of advanced radar machine that she cannot even begin to comprehend.

She doesn't examine too closely what the fact that she keeps finding him up and working says about her own sleeping patterns.

"Howard. Howard?"

No response but the faint hum of a vaguely familiar tune, the clang of steel on steel, and, worried, she approaches his work bench at last. His head comes into view, and she sees something covering his ears -- looks like tiny earbuds, with a chord that attaches them to a recorder on the other end of the work bench. She touches his shoulder gingerly, but he still startles.

"Peggy!" he exclaims, ripping out of his ears whatever device it is he's invented now, that will probably end up revolutionising the world. She can hear the tinny music coming off the ends of it, but this is not what bothers her now. She waits, and watches him fidget.

"What are you doing here?" he says at last, rubbing graphite-stained fingers into the bridge of his nose.

She ignores him -- not like there's anything she can say, anyway. "What are you working on?" she asks instead.

Howard turns and eyes the contraption, weary like he never is around his machines. Her worry ratchets up a notch.

"Something irrelevant," he says, bitterness heavy in his voice.

She looks at him, really looks, like she has been avoiding for too many years now. Wrinkles fold the skin near his eyes, and there are deep lines of unhappiness etched around his mouth.

She knows, even if she tries not to think about it too hard, that she hasn't fared much better. She perches on the side of the work table, a corner free of wiring and copper and steel sheets cut into fantastical, irregular shapes. He doesn't watch her, but he doesn't make a move to carry on working, either.

"What year is it, Stark?" she asks at last, and knows by the way his head jerks that he knows what she's getting at, even if he won't acknowledge it.

"1958," he says, picking up a cube whose side is riveted with copper bolts and glaring at it for no reason she can see. "Is this, should I be expecting a psych evaluation next?"

She rolls her eyes, doesn't rise to the bait. "Howard. Look, I realise how this must sound, coming from me--"

"Yes, P, tell me how 005 is handling his latest assignment, won't you? Been meaning to ask."

She huffs. "That thing with the Soviets is getting a bit out of hand. I need to keep him out of it, you know that."

"Well, why aren't you at MI6, working on that, instead of here, disrupting my work?"

She doesn't close her eyes like she wants to, stares him down instead. After a moment he drops his head, exhales hard.

"It's time, Howard. You've known it for a while; you just refuse to acknowledge it."

He bares his teeth at her, eyes flashing. She meets his glare calmly, resignedly. Her uniform is no longer that of the army, but she feels just as contained in her sharp black suit and knee-length pencil skirt as she used to in the brown. It's like a shell that keeps her back straight and her knees locked together, her eyes dry even when she wants to break down and sob. It's been too long, however; she isn't entirely cried out, but she is now capable of maintaining her composure, even when she's alone.

After a long, long moment of silent communication, him pushing and her refusing to budge, Howard sags, lists to the side until his hip hits the work surface, wrinkles the edge of the schematics that have trailed off the surface.

"I don't know how to stop," he says, so quietly as to be nearly inaudible.

She does move then, relents, reaches for him and draws him closer. He's never let her before, always pushing, too hard and too fast, no one farther than himself. He leans against her like his strings have been cut, hair wild around his head, goggles abandoned around his neck, the picture of a mad inventor who doesn't understand people when they aren't machines, who knows the rules and lives to break them, who can build cities but is incapable of letting anyone get close. Anyone, that is, apart from that one man who had somehow broken through all that, who appeared to like him for no reason that Howard could see, who would not give up, even after he lost one thing after another. Howard can respect that -- denial is a land whose topography he knows better than most.

How is Howard supposed to let a man like that go? A man who was in love with Howard's best friend, who was so wholly impossible, whom Howard could not understand, but could not help but be drawn to? She doesn't know the answer to those questions. She just knows that if he doesn't, she'll lose both her best friends, and that she can't bear.

"They'll find him, your people. They'll never give up looking, you know that. But you have to move on, Howard. There are so many other things out there that need you, your genius, your ridiculous sideways brain. I don't know, I can't tell you how to stop.

"But look, here's a start. I have a friend, her name is Maria. Why don't you take her out tomorrow night, or the day after? Leave the lab for one night, and go talk to some real people. She's pretty, she's smart, she has an engineering degree. I'm sure you'll find a few things to talk about."

Howard draws back before she's ready to release him, but he's never been a man you could hold still, or who would allow himself to take comfort in someone that isn't made of circuitry and metal. She lets him.

"All right," he says. He sounds defeated, and it's wrong, so wrong to hear that emotion in him, but this once Peggy imagines he needs to face it, if he'll ever succeed in putting _him_ behind.

'It isn't your fault,' she wants to say, but doesn't. They both know there was nothing Howard can do that he hasn't already. And anyway, she could say it until she's blue in the face, and he still won't accept that his very best efforts haven't been enough to find him.

They stand there, in the lab, opposite one another, she still perched on the work table and he sagging against a tall stool, until the first workers start scurrying into the building with the dawn.

\---

"Everything is achievable through technology," Howard booms, looking straight into the camera. Maria stands off to the side, half-hidden in the shadows, watching him be a genius, and feeling her heart warm ever so slightly. It's a foreign sensation; there are only three people in the world that can evoke it, and only for a while. She's never been particularly good with people. She knows how to be perfect, but not why it is she might not want it.

He keeps talking, and she keeps listening, mesmerised by the picture he's painting -- a world made of purest imagination, of daring, of human ingenuity, that he's offering to give mankind the keys to. She can follow him here, at least -- she could never possibly be as clever as him, but she knows enough to be, if not his equal, then someone who understands.

She's so absorbed that she never notices Tony going from standing by her side, staring at his father like he's the answer to every one of the world's riddles, to pattering closer and reaching out, fascinated by all the amazing toys his Dad had built, just sitting there waiting to be played with. Not, that is, until Howard snaps her out of it, calling for her to take Tony away, stop him from interfering with the filming.

And she would take him at face value, too, the tall, stern man who doesn't have time for his wife and his child, for anything that isn't work and revelling in his own genius. She knows that's how everyone who professes to know him sees him; she sees the pitying looks people throw her, send her child. It would bother her, if she cared about such things. She doesn't have too much use for emotion, however (and she knows for a fact that it's one of the reasons Howard married _her_ , and not one of the hundred other girls throwing themselves at him), and it doesn't at all.

She would, but she knows better. She's the only person, outside of Peggy, who _sees_ him, she'd wager. She takes Tony, who is resolutely not crying even if his lower lip wobbles a little, carries him out and to his room that she'd filled with toy constructors, schematics of Howard's earlier inventions, a small robot he'd sketched for her on a sketchpad she'd happened to have on her during one of their first dates. He'd never really come around to building it; she suspects he was showing off a little at the time. It's pretty, though, simple, straight lines with a few notes, almost like the directions for a do-it-yourself kit. She'd framed it, and it lives above Tony's bed these days. Every time she sees it, she remembers Howard as he'd been then, bright and still young, even if never entirely happy. She'd wondered about the sadness around his eyes then, enough that she'd asked Peggy about in, if only the once. The look in Peggy's eyes had spoken so much more than her forcibly light words, her attempts at easy dismissal. It had been something she'd needed to know before she'd decided to tie her life to Howard's; and once she did, she could understand, and feel for him all the more that warm sensation, the closest she had ever come to defining love (at the time).

She watches Tony now, the only human being she had ever (even more than Howard) felt this way about, wanted to give the world to, gift-wrapped in shiny paper. She could never compete with Howard for Tony's attention, however, even if she knew how. So she'd tried to copy her friends -- obtained a nanny, busied herself with other things so as not to think too hard about her suspicions that she was failing, as a wife, as a mother, failing Tony in ways she didn't understand and had no idea how to fix.

She watches Tony, sat in the corner with one of his projects that looks like nothing more than a mess of wires and metal, not unlike the creations in his father's lab, picking listlessly at the pieces, and she remembers with a bittersweet jolt the picture she'd walked in on last night, when she'd come back late from one of her charity galas and gone to check on Tony. Howard sat in the armchair in the corner of the room (a horribly uncomfortable design that her decorator had assured her was perfect for a nursery), hands clutching onto the armrests, eyes a little wild and full of pain while he stared at his son, in his bed against the wall.

She didn't know what to do, so she stopped the process of removing her jewellery and laid a hand on his shoulder, squeezing lightly. "What is it, Howard?" she said softly.

Howard shook his head, lips pressed tightly together. "I can't do it again, Maria," he said, voice tight and hoarse, like he'd been shouting for hours.

"Do what, darling?"

He ignored her in favour of watching Tony, sweetly curled up on his side, sleeping peacefully. "He's incredible," he said at last. "He's my son, and he is one of the most amazing people I have ever met, and he is going to change the world one day. And I can't, I don't know how to--" He stopped, rubbing hard at his chest, as if in pain.

Maria watched him struggle; watched him throw himself out of that armchair and rush out of the room, fists clenched at his sides. She looked back at her son, closed the distance between them and sat on the side of the bed, stroked back the hair that had fallen across his little face. Her poor, poor son, saddled with such useless parents. A father that loves him beyond anything in the world, but has no idea how to show it, and a mother who loves him just as much but isn't capable of even trying. Such an amazing kid. She didn't know how she and Howard could have produced something this special; wondered whether it wasn't a curse, to be blessed with someone so extraordinary, and knowing that you can't give him what he needs.

She'd stood and left the room, heart just as cold as always, wondering whether even people like her weren't capable of having it broken.

\---

Tony meets his Aunt Peggy only once that he can remember. Oh, she is familiar, and he must have met her before, but he can't quite figure out when, and anyway it doesn't matter. He is seven years old, just turned three weeks ago, when a beautiful woman with hair frozen in a tightly woven hairstyle comes through the door with his mother, looks around and sees him, smiles at him kindly but with a look in her eyes that he recognises as something he sees his father give all the time, when he's trying to puzzle out a problem.

"Hi, Tony. You probably don't remember me. I'm Peggy." She crosses over and offers him her hand, and he knows enough to take it and shake it firmly.

"Hello," he says, proficient by now in not showing uncertainty, or distress.

Peggy just watches him, still smiling, but Tony feels at ease with her in a way he couldn't explain if asked. It's not something he can measure, only know, inside. It's a novel sensation.

"What are you working on?" Peggy asks, and Tony can tell she isn't just humouring him, but is genuinely interested. Another first.

"It's a robot I'm building. Wanna see?"

"Yes, indeed I do."

Tony spends an hour explaining, while his mother sits nearby and watches them, cold and indifferent as always. Peggy listens, and asks questions, and once even suggests something that is exactly what Tony needs to make it work better. She is his favourite person in the whole world, even when she leaves again after only a few hours, with a fond smile and a pat on his head that he feels long after she's gone.

\---

He sees his mother and father hold each other at home exactly once. He is sixteen, and he's back from MIT for Christmas. No one comes to meet him once the car has rolled to a stop outside the front door, and he walks through a house as silent as a tomb, eerily unfamiliar as it always is when he's been away for a while. He's not supposed to enter his father's workshop, but after he finds not a single person in the place, he takes the stairs down to the basement anyway.

The two of them are there, his father sitting on one of the stools by the main work table, and his mother standing in front of him, between his legs. They are holding to each other for dear life, knuckles gone white where they grip at arms and shoulders, and his mother's lips are pressed together tightly, and his father's eyes are closed, and his forehead is scrunched.

They leap apart when Tony misses a step and stumbles down the last three remaining, not loudly but enough to startle them.

"Tony," his father snaps, pushing his mother away and standing. "What are you doing here?"

"It's 22nd December," Tony says slowly, confused and unsettled.

"Is it?" his father says, so honestly surprised that Tony feels abruptly exhausted.

He turns around and climbs back up the stairs, all the way up to his room, refusing to ask after his mother's red-rimmed eyes and his father's pale face. There is a promising idea for a robot he's been working on for the past three months, and he thinks he's close to making proper progress.

\---

It's only much, much later that Tony finds the article, about an explosion in London that had torn through MI6's main office and killed thirty agents at all levels of power, amongst which Director of Overseas Operations Peggy Carter.

The article is tucked away with other newspaper cuttings, concerning Captain America, the long-lost national hero. Tony's never had much use for heroes, especially not at 18 years of age, after a car accident has just left him the sole inheritor of Stark Industries. He's seen too much of the world already to believe in them.

He sets the article aside after he reads it, dry-eyed like he's been all this while. One more person leaving him is not something he doesn't expect. He ignores the rolls of film he finds inside the metal chest, slams the lid shut, and nods distractedly at the National Security agents who have come to clean out his father's office of anything above Tony's level of clearance -- which is everything.

Tony stares at the empty office, the cluttered labs, and rolls up his sleeves.

This, at least, he can fix. This, he's good at. He goes to his room, heads straight for the heap of suitcases, pulls out one that is completely indistinguishable from the rest of the pile -- if you're not Tony Stark. He opens it, and waits as machinery whirls and Dummy reassembles itself.

"All right," he says, patting the long head; Dummy looks down bashfully, butts up into his hand. "Good boy. Follow me."

Now, they can begin.

\---

Steve watches Tony all the time. He can't help it -- it's beyond his control, going to sleep (or dying, he thought he was dying, life is so strange sometimes) with the memories of Howard fresh in his mind, the socially incompetent bastard, genius or no, that didn't know how to stop; and then to be confronted with the son nursing a Gordian tangle of Daddy issues (he's never having _that_ conversation again -- not unless Tony starts it). But after seeing it so starkly (pardon the pun), he can't _un_ see it -- they are surely father and son with more in common than Tony would possibly want to acknowledge. The pig-headedness is there -- oh, is it ever there -- and so is the cockiness, the irreverent sense of humour, the natural arrogance, the belief that they know best. The Stark men, oh my.

He tries not to think too hard of the time that came before the ice, because the knowledge that he is the only one left alive of the lot of them is soul-crushing, sometimes. But he remembers being Howard's friend, the easy jokes, the way Howard would talk to him like Steve understood more than one word in four, the way he let Steve worm his way under his shell, allowed him inside with barely a thought.

And here Tony is, doing the same. Oh, Steve pushes, that's a given; he doesn't know how not to. And Tony, angry, resentful, even feeling a little threatened, in all likelihood, Tony still _lets_ him. Every time he should walk away and not rise to Steve's bait, he doesn't; he stays and fights him instead. Steve knows enough about Stark men to know what that means, how he could twist that, if he just applies the right kind of pressure.

Because he knows Tony in ways Tony doesn't know himself, in ways that are hereditary even if Tony would fight the idea to the ends of the earth. Tony is not all that different to deal with than Howard--

\--except where he is. Except where Steve can see underneath, the soft, beaten-down core, the one that Tony keeps locked up tighter than his computer system's security. There's an aching loss there, still fresh, that flares every time Tony has to do maintenance to the improved reactor that powers his heart. Steve cannot begin to imagine what it must be due to -- he is far from the thought that he knows Tony at all, in ways that Rhodey, or Pepper do. But every time Tony has to make an adjustment, takes it out of his chest and looks at it, Steve observes unnoticed the way Tony's eyes change, the mournful twist of his mouth, like he's wishing for something so hard, something he knows he'll never have.

And it just makes Steve want to reach for him, stroke those creases in the corners of his eyes until they loosen, run his fingers over Tony's eyelids until they relax and flutter closed, let the tension go.

He doesn't, of course. It's--it won't be welcomed, not now. But maybe some day. Steve can wait; if there's one thing he always excelled at, regardless of the make-up of his cells, it's patience. Because he knows, somewhere deep and unshakable, that the day will come when it will.


End file.
